


Lou Reed had surely met her

by pr_scatterbrain



Series: Model au [3]
Category: Bandom, Empires, Fashion Model RPF, Panic At The Disco, Young Veins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fashion & Models, Angst, F/M, Genderswap, Model AU, always-a-girl!Spencer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-23
Updated: 2012-07-23
Packaged: 2017-11-10 13:33:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/466867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pr_scatterbrain/pseuds/pr_scatterbrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like Spencer, Iekeliene is blonde, pale and looks like she’s twelve instead of twenty something. Unlike Spencer, Iekeliene laughs at Tom's jokes.</p>
<p>(Tom is still Tom. In her own way, Iekeliene will always be Iekeliene too).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lou Reed had surely met her

**Author's Note:**

> N.B. Thank you to my beta's ruintooeasy and inteligrrl. Saire has been involved with my crazy model au from day one - she's listened to my rants, my ideas and put up with me fashion spamming her. Without her, this too would have just stayed a random plot-bunny that never amounted to anything. inteligrrl, like Saire had no idea who Iekliene Stange was, but she kindly stepped in, helped make sense of my work and finish it. Thank you both.
> 
> Set: 2010ish, a few months after [Alright (Still)](http://pr-scatterbrain.livejournal.com/128311.html) ended. You should probably read that first, but if you can’t be bothered all you need to know is always a girl!Spencer is a model and friends with Iekeliene who is also a model and an artist (photography/mixed media/installations; her first exhibit was called [I like ponies](http://pr-scatterbrain.livejournal.com/143361.html#cutid2) and was kooky awesome). Tom is still Tom.

 

 

 

Tom meets Iekeliene at the opening of his first solo exhibit. That’s how he supposes Jon tells it. Or maybe Spencer. Probably Spencer. She is the one who invited her after all. Or maybe Ryan was the one who extended the invitation. It’s difficult to tell now they’re joined at the hip. Like Spencer, Iekeliene is blonde, pale and looks like she’s twelve instead of twenty something. Unlike Spencer, Iekeliene laughs at his jokes. It takes her a beat – as if her hearing was delayed like a satellite relay – then she laughs and then when she stops (just as suddenly as she started), she takes a sip of wine and glances away from him. But since her gaze falls on one of his framed images he isn’t too bothered.

Across the room, Ryan has his hand placed on the small of Spencer’s back and when he tilts his head up to whisper something in her ear, she cocks her head to the side. All that thick blonde hair of hers spills across her shoulder and covers them. Whatever Ryan says becomes their secret.

More than a few drinks to the wind, Tom feels like a better version of himself.

He asks her to come home with me. The wording he picks is different. But the meaning is not.

She blinks slowly and nods even slower.

“Okay,” she says.

“Good,” he answers.

On the cab ride back to his apartment, Tom kisses her.

It’s a little sloppy and off centred. She kisses him back though. Though perhaps a little disinterestedly. He pulls away. She looks away. He’s pretty sure he bought her a drink back at the party. Maybe she’s a little drunk. The cab reaches the three quarters mark. She is still awake when it arrives.

They decide to split the bill. They get out.

“You live here?” Iekeliene asks. Or maybe says. Her accent makes it difficult to tell.

“Most of the time,” he answers.

Sometimes he doesn’t lie.

Her eyes are almost translucent under the street lights. He isn’t sure even the sharpest lenses could pick them up. The lift is broken. Again. They take the stairs. She’s wearing heels. Thick, wooden clog like things. Every step she takes echoes caricatures and stereotypes.

Tom hadn’t made his bed. He forgot. If he could be bothered, he thinks he’d find it ironic.

They end up fucking on Sean’s.

The next morning she’s still there. He watches her put her bra back on and wiggle her way back into her jeans. Her long, long blonde hair is knotted; it falls unevenly around her face and down over her shoulders. Sean and Max look at her when she exits the commandeered bedroom. Tom pours himself a coffee.

“Thank you,” she says, reaching for it.

Tom – she takes it from his hands. She has to tug on it.

Her eyes meet his.

He releases his grip. The movement is too sudden. Or too late.

The coffee slops over the side of the mug.

Iekeliene says something. It’s guttural and harsh. He cannot understand it.

The chair Sean was sitting on hit the floor with the thump when he shoves it aside. Grabbing the mug and her hand, he shoves the mug onto the counter and puts her hand under the tap and runs cold water over it. When Sean turns off the tap her pale, pale skin is pink. Then it is wrapped away with a damp tea towel. When Sean finishes the makeshift bandage with a knot, she pulls her hand close to her.

Sean offers to make her breakfast.

Tom should have done that too.

She shakes her head.

Tom doesn’t know what to do. She looks at him. Automatically, he looks back at her and waits. A moment passes. Something in her gaze shifts. She calls herself a cab. He isn’t certain, but he thinks he should talk her down to the curb and wait with her. She –

She leaves.

 

 

 

He is woken a week later by the sound of his mobile.

Blearily he reaches for it, accidentally knocking over his alarm clock in the process. It’s after three in the afternoon. At least that’s what the blinking numbers on this clock suggest. It’s his agent. The art one. Or the only one. He’s never been good with label people. Or any people.

“You sold your first piece.”

Oh.

“Oh,” he says. He supposes that’s a good thing.

His agent adds something about an arts festival tentatively inquiring about him taking part in some upcoming event. He tries to make the right noises in the right places. He doesn’t know if he manages to make it sound convincing. His agent sounds annoyed by the end of the call. Tom wishes she didn’t.

When Jon comes round in the evening, Tom doesn’t mention anything. He forgets. Maybe.

Jon doesn’t notice. Tom wishes he did.

 

 

 

Iekeliene bought the piece.

“I liked it,” she says when he calls her, ostentatiously, to thank her.

(Getting her number had been all kinds of hell.

_“Why do you want her number?” Spencer asks, all glacial eyes and toneless tone._

_“Is it any of your business?”_

_“I don’t know. Maybe you should tell me. Is it?”_ )

He thought the image was one of the weakest in the exhibit. He’d only added it when he’d realised he’d completely run out of time to make anything better.

He opens his mouth. He tells her.

She is silent.

He feels unspeakable stupid.

“Your opinion doesn’t count. A hundred years from now all your bad work won’t be attributed to you,”

Now he is silent.

The line crackles.

“Where are you?”

“Croatia.”

He – what the fuck is in Croatia? Fuck. Where is Croatia?

She hums a little.

“Are you still in Chicago?” she asks, as if he, like her, could be anywhere in the world at any given moment.

“Yes.”

She hums again.

“I can see you next week if you want.”

“Okay.”

He hangs up without saying goodbye.

 

 

 

Jon suggests Tom takes her to dinner and then to a film.

“I’m not in middle school,” Tom tells him.

Cassie giggles. “She could be.”

Jon bites his lip.

Tom ends up taking Iekeliene to dinner and then to a film. They see something that stars Jennifer Garner and Ashton Kutcher. It’s a huge, fucking waste of time. In the middle of it he looks over at Iekeliene. She’s squinting at the screen, her brow wrinkled. Afterwards she tells him they characters were speaking a little fast for her.

“I enjoyed it though,” she tells him, as if that makes up for his mistake. “It was very...”

“Stupid?” Tom supplies.

They go for coffee. In the overheated shop, they sit in worn armchairs and watch teenagers and twenty-something’s. Tom runs out of conversation. He follows Iekeliene’s gaze to the barista, quickly and efficiently making drink after drink.

They end up going back to his place together, which is good because Tom doesn’t know where she is staying.

He managed to make his bed this time around. If she notices the change in venue, she doesn’t comment. He feels his heart speed up as he pulls his shirt over his head and toes off his dirty sneakers. He wonders what her heart is doing. He would ask, but she is unbuckling her boots. There are a lot of buckles. He lets her concentrate. Later he places his mouth on her pulse. It is a blur under his lips. He tells her this.

“I suppose it would be,” she replies simply.

In the darkness she lies back on his bed and he crawls up between her legs. For a little while she lets him touch her and leave a few marks on her thighs and hips. Then she tires of this. Pulling him up, she touches his face and tells him ‘enough.’

“I don’t think it is,” he replies, because he thinks he’d like to do other things to her.

“Aren’t boys like you always in a rush?” she asks.

He doesn’t know.

On certain days, sometimes.

Without exchanging another word and only a paper thin wall away from his two roommates (he can hear Max turn up his radio, and Sean tune his guitar), they fuck. She claws at his back and he pants into her neck. As far as things go, it’s pretty good. He gets her to come first and she lets him finish rather than making him stop.

Afterwards he looks at her. She is staring out the window.

She says something in her first language. She looks at him. For a moment her silvery blue eyes are so wide and searching. Then she blinks; realising her mistake.

“Sorry,” she tells him.

Whatever she said, he thinks it was a truth. He cannot think of any other explanation but that.

 

 

 

He wakes and she’s gone. There is a message on his desk. It says many things.

He skim reads it, saving the rest for later.

 

 

 

Over the next few weeks she comes and goes. Sometimes staying in Chicago for a few days, sometimes a week or more. He doesn’t really know what to do with her so they end up going out with Jon and Cassie. It feels a little strange. A little. Not much. Jon and Cassie are good at good at keeping the conversation flowing. They have a way of involving Iekeliene, insuring that she’s never left out.

When the night ends, they are enthusiastic about organising a second one.

Iekeliene is too. “They are very charming.”

He wouldn’t have chosen that word to describe them, but he can’t argue with it.

“Next week?” he offers.

She nods. “Why not?”

He doesn’t answer her. He can’t think of a reason.

 

 

 

Sometimes he finds her bringing dirty looking children’s toys back to his apartment. He watches her arrange them on his windowsill and photograph them. The morning Chicago light makes them look bleached and out of proportion. He wonders what they look like in her images. If he asked, perhaps she would let him see them.

He forgets though. He doesn’t mean to. But he does.

She’s preparing anther exhibit. Modelling is just a now and then thing for her. Sometimes it isn’t even that. Someone probably gave him a catalogue of her work, but that’s long since been lost. He looks up her last show online after waking up to a conga line of My Little Pony prancing up his arms and grazing on his torso.

He doesn’t know what to make of it.

He doesn’t know what to make of being part of her PonyLand 2.0 vision either.

“It’s a statement,” she explains from behind her camera.

“What of?”

She snaps another picture. “About my childhood.”

He looks at the camera in front of her eyes and he thinks of things all which he wouldn’t be surprised if she knew. When she falls asleep that night, he rolls out of bed and gets his own camera. He doesn’t know what image he is searching for, but none of the ones he takes are it. Some come close. But most feel like they have all been taken before.

“I started modelling when I was in university,” she tells him in the morning.

“Not at fourteen?”

“No. That’s Kate Moss.”

 

 

 

They fight, furiously.

She throws objects and he accuses her things. They both say horrid, horrid things and they mean them which make them all the crueller. He fills her voice mail with messages. She doesn’t answer a single one. Sean calls Jon when Tom tries to buy a ticket to Demark.

“She’s not from Demark,” he says. “She’s from the Netherlands.”

“The last time she talked to me she was in Demark.”

“That was a week ago. She could be anywhere.”

Jon swears. Then to illustrate this, he points out how many places Spencer has travelled to in that time.

Tom fumes.

He hates how he can never pin Iekeliene down. He hates how everything is on her terms. If she doesn’t want to talk to him, she doesn’t. If she doesn’t want to see him, she doesn’t. And if she doesn’t want him to see her or talk to her, he has no way to make her. Fuck. He can’t even randomly call in on her or crash at her place or do _anything_ without her buying an international plane ticket.

He tells her this the next time they see each other. But rather than saying all of that word for word, he asks her to move in with him.

Instead of asking if he was crazy, she says yes.

 

 

 

A week later she comes back to Chicago with five suitcases. One is filled with clothes. Two are packed with her cameras and assorted technological paraphernalia. The forth, books, while the fifth is a mystery. She puts it on the top of his wardrobe and doesn’t touch it again.

She spends days reading on his fire escape.

“I am used to worse weather,” she tells Cassie, when she worries.

“It’s still cold.”

“But my coat is lined with fox fur?”

Cassie pauses. Iekeliene looks at her. Neither known quite what to do, so they end up going out for lunch together. They do that a lot. Especially when Jon goes on tour. Once, Cassie joins Iekeliene when she goes out to have lunch with Spencer and Lily. (God, every person in Chicago hates Brian for bringing Lily to their quiet town). Tom doesn’t really like it when Spencer is in town. Most of the time Iekeliene and Lily have no real inclination to spend time with each other. Certainly they are friends with Spencer, but not really with each other. However when Spencer is in town, Iekeliene disappears and Lily appears. Like clockwork.

“She is rather caustic,” Iekeliene notes when Tom brings up Lily’s rather clearly articulated dislike of him.

Tom thinks Lily’s more than that.

Iekeliene shrugs. “She doesn’t like many people.”

“She likes you,” he retorts.

Iekeliene shrugs again. “On occasion.”

“Most occasions,” he corrects.

“You shouldn’t get upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“You did.”

“No, I said you shouldn’t get upset. That is different.”

“It’s not.”

Iekeliene blinks. “I thought it was.”

And Tom wants to pick a fight. He wants to push and he wants to yell and he knows himself well enough to know he could keep going, just from her one little comment, all night. Maybe all the next day too. But Iekeliene – he hates how she doesn’t understanding him. He hates how English being her second language is an excuse, even though it’s not, not really. Because English is her second language and she only really started putting it to constant use a few years ago.

The fight – that fight – fizzles out before it can begin.

Others do not.

They fight. Then they stop. Stop, start, stop, start with a few fucks throw in for good measure. Perhaps they’re one sided, perhaps not. Sometimes when she leaves, flying off to wherever the hell her agent sent her, Tom thinks things he knows he shouldn’t. Like maybe her agency didn’t call her. Maybe there was no photo shoot or editorial or fucking pre-exhibit meeting with the curators. That it is just her fucking off into the less than metaphorical distance because she can. Because she wants too.

He doesn’t talk to her.

Except that doesn’t work either, because she just thinks he missed her calls. Or she forgets to make them. Either or. Or maybe she is doing the same to him. Tom doesn’t know. He can’t tell. Can’t ask either. Sometimes he isn’t home when she gets back. Sometimes he goes out with his friend, or plays a gig with his band and comes home drunk or doesn’t come home at all. Lets her sit in apartment. Lets her wait there alone. Lets her know she isn’t the only one with things to do and places to be.

 

 

 

Jon has known Tom for a long time. So has Sean. They are, perhaps his oldest friends.

They like Iekeliene.

“You’re being a dick,” Jon says.

“Yeah,” Sean adds.

Sometimes, Tom thinks he hasn’t known them that long.

He finds postcards with nothing written on the back of them in Jon’s guest room. Shoe boxes and shoe boxes of them. The boxes – five out of the twelve – once belonged to Spencer. On the sides of the boxes, there are pictures of sneakers and oxfords that match shoes stored in another country. Or have long ago discarded. Spencer’s isn’t the sort of girl that wears $20 flip flops. Not anymore. Tom isn’t sure about the other seven boxes. Or maybe there are more. Jon keeps them slotted in with ordinary boxes filled with what the picture on the end suggests. Until Tom has the time to check them all (and there are a lot) he won’t know for sure.

He goes to write on one.

But he can’t pick.

He takes a handful – beaches, cityscapes, bridges, animals doing tricks, girls smiling – and flips through them. Now he really can’t choose. He picks up another handful. More reefs, palms, forests and train stations. Some new, some yellowed and aged. He sets them aside, and picks up another pile. He stops. He sees. A little plastic packet filled with a not so little amount of white powder. He stops. In his mind, he sees Ryan’s snarling face. And Brendon’s fingers clenched around Jon’s wrist instead of Spencer’s, since she wasn’t there. Wasn’t there at all.

He puts the postcards back.

He thinks Jon, of all people, can’t talk. Especially when it comes to other people’s girlfriends.

Across the apartment, Cassie calls. Dinner is ready.

Tom puts everything back the way it was before. In the toilet across the hall he presses the flusher and washes his hands. The casserole is out on the table waiting for him when he walks back out into the dining room. Jon rolls his eyes when Cassie makes him turn off the TV. In town visiting for a few days, Ryan rolls his eyes at Jon. Cassie shares a look with Tom, Tom makes sure to share it back. Spencer doesn’t share anything because she isn’t there (again).

“Girls night with Lily,” Ryan explains, his face pinched a little.

The meal is cold by the time they get around to eating it.

 

 

 

The next morning he wakes to find Iekeliene drinking a glass of water in the kitchen. As if nothing at all had happened, she lets him kiss her hello and he lets her lead him back into their bedroom and do more than kiss him. Indulgent, he lets Iekeliene do a whole lot more than kiss him. Let her traces her fingers all over her body; lets her leave bites all up and down his thighs and pull his hair and pin his arms above his head and rides him far too slowly.

In the afternoon he takes her to practice with him. Quietly she sits on the concrete floor and he sings to her. During their semi regular smoke breaks he puts his hand on the back of her neck and when they kiss, he blows smoke into the roof of her mouth. Last winter, while she was in the warm of another equator (fuck, before he had even known her name), Tom had tasted cherry flavoured vodka in a similar kiss. The cheap one that came with glitter in it; gold and purple and gritty like dirt in the last shot. He kisses her. She kisses him back.

He tells himself she is not like his ex. He tells himself that Iekeliene is not like anyone at all.

Alfred ‘Al’ (no relation) Smith snorts at their antics. He chokes on his own cigarette. Tom’s hands twitch at the sight of a lost photograph. No one but Iekeliene notices, her fingers rubbing the tightness out of Tom’s knuckles. But she turns his face into the curve of Tom’s neck and laughs, so maybe it’s just another reaction to Al being Al rather than Tom being Tom. Tom finds it hard to tell sometimes. Tom is also going to be late to work – or so Sean tells him when he checks his watch.

“You really need to get a car,” he says, like a broken record and Tom replies in kind.

Al doesn’t offer to give him a lift.

Ryan J does, but Tom knows better than to take him up on it. The kid’s still nursing bruises from tripping out of his morning shower. He ends up leaving Iekeliene with them. If she can find her way around Croatia then she can get home okay.

 

 

 

Her next exhibit is nearing.

Tom comes home to find her underneath his sheets, arranging a tea set and a pile of faded plastic animals around ankles.

“I can’t get the angle right,” she comments when he doesn’t say a word.

“Lights fading,” he replies. She better get it quick or she won’t get it at all.

She says nothing.

 

 

 

He wakes the next morning find all those chipped crockery pieces and two dollar toys outlining his body, like a parody of the chalk outlines on all those stupid cop shows.

“Don’t move,” she tells him, in a whisper.

“You’ve done this shot before,” he replies. Because she has.

“Not quite.”

“It’s close enough.”

She lets out a huff. “It’s an appropriation of that shot, then. Happy?”

A glittery purple Polly Pocket is covering his dick. He wouldn’t say he’s happy. But he lets her take her photograph and draw a few rough sketches.

 

 

 

He doesn’t know why, but he decided to give photographing her another shot. When she’s in the bath, he takes pictures of her shaving her legs, and some more when she washes her hair. He takes close up shoots of her tangled hair plastered to her back, the nick on her shin, the way her body looks in the grey Chicago light, and a few of the way her eyes look against the murky bathwater.

Later he catches her looking at them in his darkroom.

He doesn’t ask her what she thinks of them. She tells him anyway.

 

 

 

He comes to her opening night in Amsterdam.

Instead of her boyfriend he is untitled number 16, 18, 27, 28, and 31. His body made golden and eyes hooded and mouth full – stolen from him by her and put up on gallery walls. One of the photographs is one he hadn’t been aware she’d taken. He’s asleep and upon his bare skin she had placed golden stars. The kind kids got when they filled out their homework correctly. He stares at the image, at the delicate constellation spread across his body, at the single loose eyelash on his cheekbone, the way the dappled shadows stretched across his body and the way his messy hair fanned out against the white of the pillow slip.

He does not have enough money to buy the image. But he wants too. He wants too.

People circle around him, drifting from photograph to installation to watercolour. Most of them are around his age. In their hands, they each hold Iekeliene’s glossy catalogue. A few look over at him. One or two place him as the guy from the equally glossy images on the walls.

Across the room Iekeliene is surrounded by people who talk to her in languages he doesn’t understand. He looks at her but does not go over until she looks back at him.

That takes a while.

 

 

 

While in Amsterdam, he has dinner with her parents.

Their English is reasonable good. They are happy to meet him. He thinks they might even like him. Over the course of the evening, they ask him about his own photography and his band. He answers the best he can. What they (or he) doesn’t understand, Iekeliene translates. Mostly though, they talk intelligently about Iekeliene’s exhibition and her work and about the shots she took of him.

Tom does not know what he expected.

Later he asks Iekeliene about it.

“I was naked in most of them.”

“You were nude,” she corrects. “The stickers don’t count as clothing.”

He –

She looks at him.

She looks at him and now, now he knows how she sees him, Tom can’t breathe, can’t do anything but look back at her.

 

 

 

Tom is woken the next morning by a text message from Pete.

_we shd gt matching *world famous dicks* t-shirts. urs cn b bedazzled._

Tom looks at it for a while. Over his shoulder he sees Iekeliene wrinkle her nose.

“Fuck him,” she says as if it’s that simple.

 

 

 

The press covers her exhibit favourably. Or so he gathers from her expression when she goes online.

Tom can’t read any of the reviews but he knows what all the red stickers on the frames mean. When they go back over to the gallery in the morning, he counts them while Iekeliene talks to her agent and the gallery director.

Twenty seven sold.

Three more stickers go up before Iekeliene’s meeting is finished.

 

 

 

The gallery wants her to do some more press, so Iekeliene stays in Amsterdam.

“You could stay too,” she tells him. “We could go to my hometown or to Rabat and Istanbul and Turin, or wherever you want.”

“I have a job and a band. I can’t do that,” he says, because he can’t.

She looks at him. Before he can read her expression, she looks away from him.

 

 

 

His only friend currently with a working car (and who isn’t a dick) is Jon and Jon is out of town. Panic is touring or recording or something. Not that it matters. Tom catches a bus at the airport instead of a cab. It gets him half the way back to his apartment. The other half doesn’t matter. He catches another bus then walks.

Sean is at work. Max isn’t. They get drink on alcohol Tom bought at the duty free shops in Amsterdam.

“You enjoy the trip?” Max asks when everything is fuzzy and the tightness in Tom’s chest has loosened up a little.

Tom swallows another mouthful of Bombay Gin. He lies. Or he tells Max the truth. He doesn’t know. Doesn’t care.

“Yeah,” Max mumbles.

 

 

 

On the day Iekeliene was meant to flight back to Chicago, she goes to Tokyo.

He realises this three days later.

 

 

 

The night she finally does get home, his band is playing a gig.

She comes to it in black jeans and a one of his shirts. At the very front of the crowd, right up by the stage, she closes her eyes and Tom can’t take his off her. All flaxen hair and long sinuous limbs, she sways with the music and his mouth goes dry. Afterwards she comes backstage and he licks the sweat off her skin and slips his fingers down the front of her jeans. She moans into his mouth. She moans and he twists his fingers until she bits down on his lip. It isn’t enough. He wants to do more. He wants to drop to his knees. He wants to fold her up. He wants everything.

Behind the amps and a few boxes of sound equipment he makes her come once, twice and she pulls his hair and nothing is nearly enough.

 

 

 

He’s hung-over at work the next day.

Accidentally, he fucks up a roll of family reunion pictures he had meant to develop the day before. His manager, a kid around the same age as him or maybe a bit younger, yells. Tom’s head pounds and the kid with his college degree and neatly ironed collared shirts tells him, again, how to properly work the machines even though Tom knows (and knows better than him too) and then when he’s finished, Tom has to start all over again.

He doesn’t miss his bus, but he does walk home when he finishes his shift. The walk isn’t long enough though. He makes it longer. Walking three blocks past his building and then one block further to the Thai place he likes. When he gets back it’s dark and the takeaway is getting cold.

He finds Iekeliene sitting on the fire escape with a book in one hand, an unlit cigarette in the other and scrapped knees.

“What happened?”

She closes her book. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

He touches the unmarred skin at edge of red injured mess she’s made of the rest of her knees. It’s cool to the touch. With one hand, he traces an outline around the skinned section carefully. She stays still.

With one fingernail, he scraps away a fleck of dried blood. She tenses.

“I brought food,” he tells her.

“I can smell it from here,” she replies.

He helps her up.

They don’t have any iodine, but he dissolves salt in warm water and with cotton balls he cleans and disinfects her knees the best he can.

“Thank you,” she says when he finishes.

He shrugs. They eat dinner in front of the television.

 

 

 

It’s his mother’s birthday on the following weekend.

He almost completely forgets about it until Jon calls to remind him. Or to tell him to put on some clean pants and buy his mom a bunch of flowers from the 7/11 down the street. He manages clean pants, but the flowers are a little wilted by the time Jon and Cassie arrive to pick him up for the dinner.

“It’s the thought that counts,” Iekeliene offers, buttoning his cuffs.

“She’s right,” Cassie says in the car.

Tom doesn’t know.

Jon grins. “Speaking of your girl, I thought she was coming with us tonight.”

Tom blinks. “Why would you think that?”

“You meet her parents.”

“That was different.”

Jon laughs. “No, it wasn’t.”

“It was.”

Jon looks at Tom seriously. “No, Tom. It wasn’t.”

Tom – Tom changes radio stations. Like Jon could talk.

 

 

 

The radiator packs up almost at the end of winter, but not in spring.

Between Max, Sean and Tom, they can scrape together about half the cost fixing it will be. Iekeliene is in Paris. Or Vienna. One or the other. Tom can’t remember. He picks up some overtime hours and the three of them don’t go out, except for the one night where they have a gig and instead of drinking beer between songs they talk bullshit to the crowd and by the time Iekeliene is back the heat is too and Tom isn’t sleeping under her fur coats.

“You could have called. I could have helped.” she says, as if that’s a reasonable thing to state.

He focuses on undressing her.

She cups his face in her hands.

She repeats herself. But this time she says ‘should’ instead of ‘could.’

“I live here too.”

He says something. It’s the wrong something. She pushes him away.

They get into a fight.

She storms out.

At band practice, he finds her standing outside when he goes to take a smoke break. The wind tosses her hair around and knots it. He goes to untangle it.

She moves out of his reach.

“What?” he throws at her.

“Fuck you,” she throws right back at him.

 

 

 

When he returns to band practice, his knuckles are bloody from punching the wall.

“What the fuck were you thinking Tommy boy?” Jon asks or maybe just says when Sean calls him from the emergency ward.

Tom ignores him and the platinum visa card Jon hands over when the bill is printed out. Iekeliene does the same thing to Tom, when he gets home four hours later. Fuzzy on antibiotics he stares at her turned back. Stupid on pain medication he presses himself along it, scraping his mouth along her tense shoulders before settling in the curve of her neck.

“Don’t,” she tells him stiffly.

He – he wants to tell her he can’t not.

 

 

 

He and his band pack up for their one state summer tour.

He calls home once. She answers after three rings.

In his head she’s barefoot on the dirty linoleum floor.

Over the phone she’s mostly silent. So is he.

At the next show he sings his heart out to a pretty little (probably underage) redhead. He doesn’t know why. He just does. He would have fucked her too. Could have. He makes that clear. So does the video she and her giggling friends post online the next day.

“What are you doing?” Sean asks.

Tom doesn’t have an answer.

Three weeks in, she turns up backstage.

She stays for about a week. Then one morning she wakes up and asks to be dropped off at the local airport.

“You have somewhere to be?” Max queries, from the driver’s seat of the van.

For a beat, only the static sounds of the radio fill the van.

Iekeliene shrugs.

When they get to the airport Tom almost leaves with her. If his band wasn’t waiting outside in the short-term parking lot, Tom thinks he might have.

He calls her again. She doesn’t answer.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
